Politics before people

On August 26, 2001, the Norwegian ship Tampa rescued 438 men, women and children from a sinking Indonesian fishing boat. They were refugees, mainly from Afghanistan, and they were headed for the Australian territory of Christmas Island.

The Tampa had diverted from its course to the sinking vessel in accordance with the accepted obligation and tradition of seafarers. To that extent it was a normal event. As it turned out, nothing else was normal about it.

Australia was soon to have a federal election. At the instigation of a seemingly desperate government the Tampa rescue and what followed became the centrepiece in the election campaign.

There were many casualties from the clever exploitation of the refugees issue. Apart from the refugees (those who survived and those who did not), there were politicians in both major parties (those who triumphed and those who did not), public servants, senior defence personnel and journalists, whose reputations were diminished. The biggest casualties were Australians' confidence about their myths, Australia's international standing and, of course, the truth.

Each of these things is important in Australia's "progress" to we know not where. Together they constituted a giant leap backwards in Australia's history as a migrant nation. For this reason Dark Victory, which traces the story from before the Tampa rescue to the election aftermath, is an important book. It is also thoroughly researched, well documented and a fine piece of narrative writing, hard to put down.");document.write("

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Not much time is wasted in analysing Australians' neuroses about people arriving in boats and "floods" from the north, which have always provided fertile ground for conservative threat experts. This unhappy reality is taken as a fact. As is the legitimate question of Australia's need for a border-protection policy. This book instead concentrates on how these issues were played out in 2001.

Like most good narratives Dark Secret has its heroes and villains. The heroes are the captain of the Tampa, Arne Rinnan, some officers and crew of Australian navy ships, those senior military personnel with a courageous commitment to the truth and a handful of concerned lawyers. The villains speak for themselves and the language used to demonise refugees is instructive and important. This sort of thing can become a habit.

As George Orwell ruefully observed "political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind". From the time of Prime Minister John Howard's decision to stop the Tampa refugees from landing at Christmas Island the wind blew consistently in one direction, fanned by ministers, bureaucrats and most of the media. It muffled dissenting voices. Ultimately, as the authors of Dark Victory point out, "the key to the government's success was the collaboration of the Opposition".

Consider the language. From the mouths of ministers "asylum seekers" became "unlawful entrants", "illegals", "economic refugees", "life-style refugees" and ultimately "queue jumpers", descriptions that laid the foundation for later comments such as "I don't want people like that in Australia... genuine refugees don't do that...", and the suggestion that there were terrorists among the refugees.

Perhaps it is nostalgic to recall earlier times when people arriving in boats (large and small) were known in idiomatic Australian as "reffos", "Balts", "dagoes", "wogs", "Viets", and just "boat people". Somehow they were always people.

It is an interesting and none-too-healthy phenomenon that the Coalition Government in the past few years has more than ever been dominated by lawyers. Of the four ministers who were the frontrunners in the border protection election of 2001, three, Howard, Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock and then defence minister Peter Reith, were former solicitors who made an early transition to politics.

Only Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, who had enjoyed a brief stint in the lifestyle cocoon of a junior diplomat in Brussels, had experienced living in a country with a different language and a marginally different culture.

The road from private school (Howard being an exception) to a solicitor's office, to politics is, in the absence of more diverse life and work experiences, usually smooth but narrow. For solicitors, cleverness and attention to detail are important, the focus is on day-to-day victories or defeats and the truth is an irritating and at times dispensable impediment to winning. Little attention is given to the longer term. The larger picture is reduced to pettifoggery.

The authors of Dark Victory, journalists David Marr and Marian Wilkinson, the Washington correspondent for this paper, are too disciplined to indulge in speculations of this kind, which provide as good an explanation as any for several things revealed in the book. For example, Ruddock is known in Indonesia as "the minister with no ears" because of his habit of haranguing Indonesian officials rather than listening.

In June 2001 at a meeting with Australian officials in our embassy in Jakarta, Ruddock kept pursuing the question why pirates did not attack the refugee boats. Hope, it seems, springs eternal in the mind of a minister. This bizarre discussion was brought to an end by a senior federal police officer, who said he could not speak for pirates, being "a simple police officer and not a politician".

Perhaps the "narrow-casting" of politicians is also an explanation of the rudeness, bullying and arrogance that ministers displayed in their dealings with the Norwegian Government, the owners and captain of the Tampa, the Indonesians and, later, the Naruans. It enabled politics to be put before people in the delivery of medical help to the Tampa. It undermined "years of hard diplomatic effort" by Coalition and Labor Governments in which "Australia had positioned itself as a leader of United Nations' campaigns against racism, poverty and oppression".

This was the highest price Australia paid. So far it has only been a down payment. In international affairs bad and short-sighted behaviour can come back to haunt you. Dark Victory is not only a fascinating description of past events; between the lines there are dark portents of repercussions yet to come.

John Button was the Labor government's industry minister between 1983 and 1993.